Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Seventeen

The door to the turret swung open as soon as I touched the lock with the big old-fashioned key. Returning home to an unlatched door at eight thirty in the morning, when the sun is up far enough to chase away most of the bogeymen that might be hiding in the shadows, is not as creepy as coming home to a picked lock in the middle of the night. It’s close, though. Especially considering that I’d been double-checking the lock on my way out ever since the evening, a few days earlier, when I’d come home to find the door ajar.

I bent down; the bolt was stuck. I had to thumb the latch several times before it popped out. I’d oiled it, but it needed more.

But the bolt had caught when I left. I was sure of that. I nudged the door open. Inside, in the narrow beams of sunlight streaming in from the slit windows, the table saw and the plastic chair were exactly as I’d left them.

I went up the stairs, letting them ring loudly. At the second-floor landing, I stopped, holding my breath. The turret was like a crypt, dead to outside noise. I gave it a long count, strained to listen. Nothing moved.

I stepped into the kitchen. Every unfinished cabinet stood right where it had been. My tools lay scattered in the same places that I’d left them. I crossed the hall, opened the office door.

Carolina’s old Underwood typewriter was gone from the card table.

Her old newspaper columns lay in jumbled piles on the floor, next to the haphazard stacks of boxes of my old business files. I could have left them that way, or they could have been pawed through. I couldn’t tell.

For sure, though, the typewriter had been there.

I ran up the stairs. The third-floor bedroom was a mess, clothes heaped on the one chair, the bed unmade, but it was the mess I’d left. Running up more stairs revealed the undisturbed dust on the fourth floor. The ladder I used to climb up to the fifth floor still lay tilted on its side against the wall. No one had set it under the trapdoor to the top floor. I was alone in the turret.

I went back down to my office, and this time, I saw what I’d overlooked. A small note lay on the card table, where the typewriter had been.

“D,” he’d written. “I hope you don’t mind, but I used my key to grab the old typewriter. I want to give it a solid going over. Call it indulging a ghost. Leo.”

I didn’t mind, not even the thrill he’d just given me by being too preoccupied to remember to lock the door. For years, that same ghost had visited me, too, more days and nights than not. That was long ago, and hardly ever since I met Amanda.

An hour later, I was in Indiana. It was going to be a good day, I told the radio, swinging beneath the dash in perfect concordance with the music and the jolts from the potholes along the interstate. With luck, I’d get the blood samples from Carolina’s cottage, ingest a foot of onion rings, drop off the keys at Aggert’s, and be back in Rivertown before the evening rush hour. I supposed the trip was unnecessary-I could have overnighted the keys to Aggert, and the blood sample would likely never be used-but it was a fine March day, alive with sun and the promise of onion rings.

I got to the West Haven Wal-Mart at eleven thirty, took a right, and blew through the husk of downtown Rambling twenty-five minutes later. At County Road 12, I turned left.

On the passenger seat beside me, two small pieces of plywood rested beneath a hand saw. They would replace the two panes of blood-splattered glass I was going to remove from Carolina’s front porch. It was sure to excite Mrs. Sturrow, but I planned to leave money to replace the glass with Aggert when I dropped off the keys.

I slowed for the driveway that was about to appear past the copse of trees on my left. As the trees passed and I began to turn, my feet reacted quicker than my mind could absorb, and I hit the brakes too hard. The Jeep skidded off the ruts of the drive and slid twenty feet into the snow-covered yard before shuddering to a stop.

I stared through the gap between the tape strips on the side window, disoriented. I looked to the right and to the left, for anything that was familiar. The thin, spindly trees at the sides and back of the property were the same, as were the wind-glazed fields beyond, bright now in the glare of the late-morning sun. It was the same clearing, my brain told my gut.

But Carolina’s cottage was gone.

It lay in a blackened heap, burned down to its cinder-block foundation. At the end of the rutted drive, the garage was gone, too, its boards charred and collapsed, mounded onto the shape of the old Dodge Aries.

I got out. The rancid stench of fire hung in the air like fresh death. Here and there, wispy tendrils of smoke curled up from the pile.

I walked up to where the porch had been, bent down to feel the rubble. Even in the cold, the cracked fragments of siding and twisted pieces of studs and boards were still faintly warm-and drenched. My hand came away wet and blackened. The fire had just been put out.

I walked around the smoldering debris. None of the glass was intact. It lay shattered here and there in the pile on the ground, a million bits of blackened crystal, trying to sparkle in the sun. I wondered if the windows had been blown out by the force of tremendous heat. There was no blood evidence anymore. There was no evidence of any kind anymore.

I went back to what had been the garage. Parts of the old Aries showed through the charred boards, soot-streaked, gray-primered in the spots where the pale blue paint had blistered away.

I looked back at the house. I’d been around enough insurance fires to recognize arson. Almost all accidental fires are irregular, totally destroying some parts of a structure while leaving others eerily pristine. This destruction had been complete. The fire had consumed everything, boards and glass and plaster-and fingerprints and blood traces. It had been carefully set to destroy everything.

I walked back to the Jeep, sat behind the wheel, and called Reynolds. His cell phone asked for a message. “I assume you already know that Carolina’s cottage was torched.” Then I said what I was struggling to understand. “Question number one: Why didn’t you call me? Question number two: Who set the fire, Reynolds?”

I still had the number of the sheriff’s department. Dillard was out. I asked for the phone number for the firehouse closest to Rambling. It was in Bangor, ten miles away. A lieutenant said he could see me as soon as I got there.

“Happened last night, around midnight,” he said fifteen minutes later. He’d been waiting for me on the wide drive out front. “By the time we got there, the structure was down.”

“And the garage?” I asked.

“Simultaneous.”

“Arson,” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said, “but we’ll never find out who set it. We get fires like that one. Kids mostly, bored, looking for something to do.”

“Could it have been landlord lightning?”

“Set to collect insurance? We don’t have the resources to investigate for that.”

“It was very destructive, for an amateur job. Nothing remains.”

He whistled under his breath. “Professional? Why would anybody torch a claptrap cottage in Rambling?”

“The woman who lived there, Louise Thomas, went missing a month ago.”

“I hadn’t heard that. Is the sheriff working on it?”

He raised his eyebrows when I said Dillard could fill him in on what wasn’t being done. “There wasn’t much evidence in the cottage,” I went on, “just a few smudges of blood, some broken windows, and overturned furniture. Nothing that pointed conclusively to an abduction.”

“And now even that’s gone.”

I nodded.

“I’ll call Dillard,” the fire lieutenant said, “make sure he knows about this fire.”

I drove back to West Haven and climbed the stairs to Aggert’s office. His door was locked. It didn’t matter. There was no point anymore in dropping off keys to a house that had burned down and a car that had just been destroyed. There was no point, either, in hanging around. I got on the expressway and headed south.

Just after 196 turned onto 94 West, I called Sergeant Patterson in Iowa. “I’m up in Michigan, just done staring at a burned pile that used to be Carolina Dare’s house. It’s gone, all of it, gone.”

“Not accidental?” He’d caught the tone in my voice.

“As accidental as that trailer fire that killed Lucia Helm.”

“You think your client may not be running?”

“She didn’t set the fire. Someone else did, someone who wanted to destroy whatever was still in that cottage.”

I listened to him breathe for a minute, and then he said, “We do what we’re doing. We find something with Lucia’s fingerprints still on it, make sure she was the letter writer. We kick up the suspected charges on the Kovacs brothers, include suspicion of Severs’s murder, get federal help to find them. But I don’t know if any of that gets you the guy who set your fire, or the whereabouts of your columnist.”

“Did you get a driver’s license photo of Carolina Dare?”

“I submitted a request this morning.”

“You need that right away, to send around to every police department.”

“More curious now about who hired you?”

Something queasy played at my gut. “I’m not so sure anymore that she’s running.”